Posts Tagged "computers"

Science at the World Economic Forum is about inspiration, solutions and collaboration. First and foremost, leaders come together in Davos to address global challenges such as antibiotic resistance, climate change and understanding the human mind. Science has a critical role to play helping leaders understand why we have these problems, and increasingly leaders are looking [...]

David Gleicher is Senior Programme Manager at the World Economic Forum where he is responsible for science, technology and health-related discussions at the Forum’s annual meetings in Davos and China. He has held research positions in the Forum’s global risks and scenario-planning teams and managed the work of the Forum’s global agenda councils on personalized and precision medicine, and space security. Prior to joining the Forum, he worked in WHO’s offices at the European Union and for Global Health Europe.org.
David can be found on Twitter as @DavidGleicher.

A recent report from Europol’s European Cybercrime Center includes a forecast that the world’s first “online murder” will likely occur before the end of 2014. Obviously this is a frightening concept and one that a number of news outlets quickly seized upon with ominous headlines. However, there’s a far more dangerous story that underlies this [...]

Richard Yonck is a foresight analyst, author and speaker at Intelligent Future Consulting. He’s guided businesses through the ever-shifting technology landscape for over two decades and writes extensively about the future and emerging technologies for numerous publications. Yonck lives in Seattle, where he is currently working on his latest book, “The Emotional Machine,” an exploration of the promise and perils we’ll face as computers become increasingly capable of reading, replicating and manipulating our emotions.

Today, maintaining privacy without guided assistance is an onerous task, whose initial costs are high, immediate rewards low and solutions fragile and constantly evolving. The moment after perfectly balancing your Facebook privacy settings, a new “feature” is introduced and suddenly potential employers can view your bachelor party photos. While you admit you should password protect [...]

A pair of security researchers in the U.K. have released a paper [PDF] documenting what they describe as the “first real world detection of a backdoor” in a microchip—an opening that could allow a malicious actor to monitor or change the information on the chip. The researchers, Sergei Skorobogatov of the University of Cambridge and [...]

In 1936, whilst studying for his Ph.D. at Princeton University, the English mathematician Alan Turing published a paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” which became the foundation of computer science. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by simple instructions encoded on [...]

Ian Watson is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Auckland, New Zealand where he researches in machine learning and Game AI. Ian has just written a popular science book called The Universal Machine - from the dawn of computing to digital consciousness. Ian blogs about the history and future of computing at The Universal Machine. You can follow him on twitter @driwatson, Google+, or Facebook. Ian can be found on Twitter as @driwatson.

Editor’s note: This blog is the first in a series of guest posts on technology and the brain to celebrate Scientific American Mind’s 10-year anniversary. The magazine’s special November/December issue similarly highlights the interface between code and thought in profiling a future, more digital YOU. “You know my methods, Watson.” – Sherlock Holmes Even those [...]

Rob High is the Chief Technology Officer of IBM Watson, where he leads the technical strategy and thought leadership of IBM Watson. Follow IBM Watson on Twitter@IBMWatson

Jho Low is the Chief Executive Officer of Jynwel Capital Limited and Director of Jynwel Charitable Foundation Limited, which looks to fund breakthrough programs that help scale and accelerate advancements in health. Follow on Twitter @jho_low

The discovery of a new species of highly sophisticated malware earlier this week adds another puzzle piece to the contemporary cyberwar battleground. Flame, as it’s called, is a whopper of a program—20 megabytes, the size of a video file, and 40 times bigger than the Stuxnet virus that took down Iranium centrifuges back in 2010. But [...]

Last month MIT’s Technology Review reported on a new development that the energy efficiency of computers doubles roughly every 18 months: The conclusion, backed up by six decades of data, mirrors Moore’s law, the observation from Intel founder Gordon Moore that computer processing power doubles about every 18 months. But the power-consumption trend might have [...]

An engineer and policy researcher who writes about energy, technology, and policy - and everything in between. Based in Austin, Texas. Comments? david.m.wogan@gmail.com David can be found on Twitter as @davidwogan.

As you’ve no doubt read, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is stepping down from the company he co-founded three decades ago. Tim Cook will take over the reigns for the long-term, and has served as COO since 200. For those who don’t follow Apple nerdery obsessively like I do, This Is My Next has a profile [...]

An engineer and policy researcher who writes about energy, technology, and policy - and everything in between. Based in Austin, Texas. Comments? david.m.wogan@gmail.com David can be found on Twitter as @davidwogan.

Scientists don’t usually lodge a protest against projects funded to the tune of 1.2 billion euros. They usually try to make nice with the organizers to get in on the action. No one is taking to the streets this time, but more than 200 people (and climbing), among them prominent scientists, are using the megaphone [...]

Gary Stix, a senior editor, commissions, writes, and edits features, news articles and Web blogs for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. His area of coverage is neuroscience. He also has frequently been the issue or section editor for special issues or reports on topics ranging from nanotechnology to obesity. He has worked for more than 20 years at SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, following three years as a science journalist at IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has an undergraduate degree in journalism from New York University. With his wife, Miriam Lacob, he wrote a general primer on technology called Who Gives a Gigabyte?
Gary can be found on Twitter as @@gstix1.

The era of Big Neuroscience has arrived. In late January, The Human Brain Project—an attempt to create a computer simulation of the brain at every scale from the nano nano to the macro biotic—announced that it had successfully arranged a billion Euro funding package for a 10-year run. And then on Feb. 18, an article [...]

Gary Stix, a senior editor, commissions, writes, and edits features, news articles and Web blogs for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. His area of coverage is neuroscience. He also has frequently been the issue or section editor for special issues or reports on topics ranging from nanotechnology to obesity. He has worked for more than 20 years at SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, following three years as a science journalist at IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has an undergraduate degree in journalism from New York University. With his wife, Miriam Lacob, he wrote a general primer on technology called Who Gives a Gigabyte?
Gary can be found on Twitter as @@gstix1.